Culture

I haven’t been keeping close track of the AI set’s various perversions — maybe they’re into chatbots, idk — but swinging, orgies, and open relationships were a major thing among the Gen X and older Millennial sets out here. Anyway, here’s an anonymous look back at sex in the Valley during the rise of Donald Trump and the #MeToo movement that followed.

Glitchy lo-fi art. Inscrutable plot. Fake backstory about a 35th anniversary release. Kings. Swords in stones. Spaceships. Oh, and an absolutely killer soundtrack. You owe it to yourself to go spend a few minutes exploring the strangely beautiful (in an ugly sort of way) world of Ruin.

Developer Niels Leenheer decided to see if he could recreate the classic FPS using the language that describes webpage formatting. cssDOOM is a bit messy and definitely pushing the limits of what is possible using cascading style sheets, but it’s undeniably impressive.

20-foot tall Evangelion statue: $326,000. Visitors: ≈51,800 from April to January. Payoff: $6.9 million in economic impact. I’d vote for one in my town!

The proliferation of automated podcast tools has reached a sadly inevitable outcome: WebinarTV is scraping open Zoom meeting links and turning call recordings into content for its platform without telling anyone. (Or paying for anything, of course.) Our friends at 404 Media have the whole story.

Wisdom Kaye is one of the most impressive creators I’ve had the joy to experience, and one of my favorite TikTokers. If you want to go down an incredible rabbit hole just go watch all of his videos. (Here’s one of my favorites.) But this one is for the ages — he just styled the solar system. If you’re not blown away you’re living in another galaxy.

We just published our new Decoder interview with Chris Cocks, the head of Hasbro. I asked him directly about how he thinks about author J.K. Rowling’s politics and what it’s done to the Harry Potter fandom, following Hasbro’s major Harry Potter merchandising agreement announced just last month. Here’s what Chris had to say.

The popular fanfiction archive has been up and down since around noon ET yesterday. While service was temporarily restored by 8PM ET, the platform went down again shortly after, and will remain so for “at least several hours” while AO3 attempts to resolve the issue.

Redfin is doing a geoguessing-themed game of skill to give away a million-dollar house in its app, based on clues found in its Super Bowl ad, and Rainbolt is part of the promo — but he’s not allowed to help, based on the rules here.

If you believe internet rumors claiming the Stranger Things finale had “two hours” cut from its two-hour runtime, and have ignored actors and others saying that the claim is fake, the show’s creators have responded.

Critic Ben Davis rounds up the art words that helped him better process 2025. I think the term “delightmare” hits the spot:

In court Thursday during evidence suppression hearings, prosecutors showed a hand-written note that police say they found among Mangione’s possessions. It was only briefly shown and hard to make out, but one day’s tasks included buying USBs and a digital camera from Best Buy. Journalist Lorena O’Neil reports one section of the note may have referenced archiving social media pages, which were scrutinized by the public after Mangione’s arrest.

As usual, Google is back with another set of the year’s top trending searches, as well as archived lists for previous years. Just don’t be too surprised when you see 2025 top spots taken up by Charlie Kirk, KPop Demon Hunters, or Arc Raiders.

Though Club Chalamet started off as just another stan account, The Wall Street Journal reports that Simone Cromer — the woman behind the Timothée-obsessed page — has found new success on Substack where she has generated enough revenue to “cover the cost of her summer vacation to Italy” with just a few hundred subscribers.

We’re back in New York court this morning for pre-trial hearings on whether key evidence in the UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting case will be barred from being shown to jurors — that includes items like a firearm and notebook recovered when Mangione was arrested. As I left the courthouse last night, some Mangione supporters were already “in line” to try to get inside on Tuesday. They camped out across the street in tents overnight.

A Department of Corrections officer at the Pennsylvania prison where Mangione was held after his arrest told the court that he and Mangione discussed how traditional media and social media was reacting to the shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. The corrections officer told Mangione that from his perspective, mainstream media focused on the crime, whereas social media users discussed the wrongdoings of the healthcare industry.

Not every day you get to physically own a meme!

The state has called two witnesses today: the deputy commissioner of public information at the NYPD and an employee at a surveillance system company in Pennsylvania. It’s part of the vast surveillance network that led to Mangione’s arrest: NYPD releasing several photos and videos of the shooting suspect which were then published by countless news outlets, as well as the video surveillance system in the Pennsylvania McDonald’s where Mangione was arrested.

We’re more than an hour and a half behind the scheduled start time for the hearing in New York. Mangione was allowed to wear street clothes today, which elicited wall-to-wall news coverage last month. He’s wearing a gray suit and light dress shirt.

Just when you thought you had heard the last of Labubus, Tim Cook gets a custom one. Kasing Lung, the artist responsible for the viral sensation, gifted Cook a doll wearing glasses and holding an iPhone. But is it really a Labubu if you didn’t spend hours trying to buy one?

In a private meeting with members of media, the pope condemned clickbait news as a “degrading practice,” The Guardian reports. Pope Leo XIV is clearly thinking about the digital information ecosystem: he said he chose his papal name in part due to developments in AI “that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.” Will the pope weigh in on SEO next?

To support their suits against OPM and DOGE, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is selling a retro-looking ringer t-shirt, and honestly it’s kind of a banger. I think I am going to buy one, hem it into a crop top and wear it when I go rock climbing. At $25 it’s a steal.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) sent a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation accusing the site of “left-wing bias.” As I wrote in a feature about the site last month, there is a growing campaign by the Trump administration and other powerful actors around the world to influence the encyclopedia.